WebMD Lifestyle Design System
Utilizing segmented Lifestyle Channels, we drew in over 184m page-views with an average of 2.5 minutes spent on articles/pages, which allowed us to sell unique advertising and sponsorship experiences. Bringing in over $10m using editorial branding through design systems and lifestyle branding.
Problem
From an editorial perspective, like many other leading editorial sites , WebMD is very content heavy. Both TOC and the standard article pages are filled with legacy content and content is often pushed live with an inconsistent structure. From a business perspective, even as a non-pay walled fully sponsored site, WebMD Pet Center is still very ad-heavy compared to other free content sites. This has a negative impact on user experiences and also creates a high impression, but low CTR, low view ability of ads with low completion rate. A lot of current ad products were designed 4-5 years ago and look outdated due to industry trends, tech support and device updates.
Process
As we started looking at data and talking to stakeholders and users, it became clear that we would be have to build an engaging user experience that encourages further exploration. We knew that 82% of traffic came from SEO from places like google and over 63% were mobile users. The goal was to create a cohesive content template to ensure consistency across all pages, thus enhancing discoverability of legacy and new content through intuitive user journeys.
Our research indicated that the article pages and slideshows were the most viewed and it would be important to get those right as they were the primary revenue source and a major traffic source. By looking at the current design we changed ad placements to make it look more intentional and integrated. These placements would also lend themselves to the idea of branded takeovers in the future with a complete series of ads.
We knew if this design was successful we could branch out into other sub brands, so we broke away from the standard WebMD branding by using the Google Font Poppins and implemented a warm color palette to give the content a warm personality. We suspected Integrating lifestyle brand elements would elevate engagement and boost CPG sales.
Therefore we named the sub brand Fetch and designed a one off logo to essentially rebrand the Pet Center content.
Solution
The redesign of Fetch transformed our traditional article pages into a user-centric lifestyle platform that balances content density with accessibility. By focusing on developing a scalable template, streamlined navigation, and enhanced CPG integration, the lifestyle channel template not only improved user experience but also achieved measurable business results. The redesign embedded CPG-related content seamlessly within lifestyle articles, highlighting products in a non-intrusive, contextual manner.
Results
After implementation we noticed Improved engagement including an increase in the time on a page. This Increased by 27% due to enhanced readability and related content recommendations.
Bounce Rate was Decreased by 18% as users found it easier to navigate and explore related topics.
From a CPG Sales Growth in Q4 2019-2020 CPG sales rose by 11%, with 80% of the growth attributed to Fetch’s redesigned lifestyle brand template and improved integration of CPG partnerships.
Content Discoverability was also affected with legacy content seeing a 22% uptick in page views, driven by improved TOC and search functionalities.
After the success of the Fetch Lifestyle brand, WebMD continued to build out 5 additional lifestyle hubs.
Each of these sub brands would go on to develop “Tentpole” sponsored destinations that would be limited time/sponsored article hubs relevant to brands in their respective domain such as fitness, dieting, beauty etc. These lead to over 10 million in sales across the portfolio of the lifestyle brands.